In this study, we explored the relationship between beginning readers' phonological awareness and other aspects of phonological processing, specifically as manifested in short-term memory and comprehension tasks. The theoretical questions underlying the study were (a) what roles phonological processes play in children's beginning reading, from word identification through sentence comprehension, and (b) whether those roles are sufficiently related that potential difficulties at one level directly affect processing at other levels. Phonologically induced effects were observed for word-list memory and for sentence judgments for both novice readers (at the end of kindergarten) and relatively more experienced readers (end of Grades 1 and 2). For both age groups, correlational analyses revealed relationships among phonological awareness, phonological processing in list memory, and word reading. However, phonological processing in sentence comprehension was not related to other types of phonological processing. These results indicate that although phonology plays a role during comprehension, phonological processing may not be as limiting a factor in comprehension as in word reading.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
1.
Adams, M.J. (1990). Beginning to read: Thinking and learning about print. Cam-bridge, MA: MIT Press .
2.
Baddeley, A. (1998). Human memory. Boston: Allyn & Bacon.
3.
Ball, E.W., & Blachman, B.A. (1991). Does phoneme awareness training in kindergarten make a difference in early word recognition and developmental spelling?Reading Research Quarterly, 26, 49—66.
4.
Berninger, V.W., Yates, C., & Lester, K. (1991). Multiple orthographic codes in reading and writing acquisition. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal , 3, 115—149.
5.
Bradley, L., & Bryant, P.E. (1985). Rhyme and reason in reading and spelling. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
6.
Castiglioni-Spalten, M.L., & Ehri, L. (2003). Phonemic awareness instruction: Contribution of articulatory segmentation to novice beginners' reading and spelling. Scientific Studies of Reading, 7, 25—52.
7.
Conrad, R., & Hull, A.J. (1964). Information, acoustic confusion, and memory span . The British Journal of Psychology, 55, 429—432.
8.
Crain-Thoreson, C. (1996). Phonemic processes in children's listening and reading comprehension. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 10, 383—401.
9.
Cunningham, A.E. (1990). Explicit versus implicit instruction in phonemic awareness. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 50, 429—444.
10.
de Jong, P. F., & van der Leij, A. (2002). Effects of phonological abilities and linguistic comprehension on the development of reading. Scientific Studies of Reading, 6, 51—77.
11.
Ehri, L.C. (1992). Reconceptualizing the development of sight word reading and its relationship to decoding. In P. B. Gough, L. C. Ehri, & R. Treiman (Eds.), Reading acquisition (pp. 107—143). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
12.
Ehri, L.C. (1993). How English orthography influences phonological knowledge as children learn to read and spell. In R. Scholes (Ed.), Literacy and language analysis (pp. 21—43). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
13.
Ehri, L., Nunes, S., Willows, D., Schuster, B., Yaghoub-Zadeh, Z., & Shanahan, T. (2001). Phonemic awareness instruction helps children learn to read: Evidence from the National Reading Panel's meta-analysis. Reading Research Quarterly, 36, 250—287.
14.
Frost, R. (1998). Toward a strong phonological theory of visual word recognition: True issues and false trails. Psychological Bulletin,123, 71—99.
15.
Griffith, P., & Olson, M.W. (1992). Phonemic awareness helps beginning readers break the code. The Reading Teacher, 45, 516—523.
16.
Haber, L.R., & Haber, R.N. (1982). Does silent reading involve articulation? Evidence from tongue-twisters. The American Journal of Psychology, 95, 409—419.
17.
Hanson, V.L., Goodall, E.W., & Perfetti, C.A. (1991). Tongue-twister effects in the silent reading of hearing and deaf college students. Journal of Memory andLanguage, 30, 319—330.
18.
Holligan, C., & Johnston, R.S. (1988). The use of phonological information by good and poor readers in memory and reading tasks. Memory & Cognition, 16, 522—532.
19.
Kabrich, M., & McCutchen, D. (1996). Phonemic support in comprehension: Comparisons between children with and without mild mental retardation. American Journal of Mental Retardation, 100, 510— 527.
20.
Keller, T.A., Carpenter, P.A., & Just, M.A. (2003). Brain imaging of tongue-twister sentence comprehension: Twisting the tongue and the brain. Brain andLanguage, 84, 189—203.
21.
Lonigan, C.J., Burgess, S.R., Anthony, J.L., & Barker, T.A. (1998). Development of phonological sensitivity in 2- to 5-year old children. Journal of Educational Psychology , 90, 294—311.
Mann, V.A. (1993). Phoneme awareness and future reading ability. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 26, 259—269.
24.
Mann, V.A., Liberman, I.Y., & Shankweiler, D. (1980). Children's memory for sentences and word strings in relation to reading ability. Memory & Cognition, 8, 329—335.
25.
McBride-Chang, C. (1995). What is phonological awareness?Journal of Educational Psychology, 87, 179—192.
26.
McBride-Chang, C., Wagner, R.K., & Chang, L. (1997). Growth modeling of phonological awareness. Journal of Educational Psychology, 890, 621—630.
27.
McCutchen, D., Abbott, R.D., Green, L.B., Beretvas, S.N., Cox, S., Potter, N.S., et al. (2002). Beginning literacy: Links among teacher knowledge, teacher practice, and student learning. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 35, 69—86.
28.
McCutchen, D., Bell, L.C., France, I.M., & Perfetti, C.A. (1991). Phoneme-specific interference in reading: The tongue-twister effect revisited. Reading Research Quarterly, 26, 87—103.
29.
McCutchen, D., & Crain-Thoreson, C. (1994). Phonemic processes in children's reading comprehension. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 58, 69—87.
30.
McCutchen, D., & Perfetti, C.A. (1982). The visual tongue-twister effect: Phonological activation in silent reading. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 21, 672—687.
31.
McDougall, S., Hulme, C., Ellis, A., & Monk, A. (1994). Learning to read: The role of short-term memory and phonological skills. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology , 58, 112—133.
32.
McNeil, A.M., & Johnston, R.S. (2004). Word length, phonemic, and visual similarity effects in poor and normal readers. Memory & Cognition, 32, 687—695.
33.
Morris, R.D., Shaywitz, S.E., Shankweiler, D.P., Katz, L., Stuebing, K.K., Fletcher, J.M., et al. (1998). Subtypes of reading disability: Variability around a phonological core. Journal of Educational Psychology , 90, 347—373.
34.
Muter, V., Hulme, C., Snowling, M., & Taylor, S. (1997). Segmentation, not rhyming, predicts early progress in learning to read. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology , 65, 370—396.
35.
Nation, K., & Hulme, C. (1997). Phonemic segmentation, not onset—rime segmentation, predicts early reading and spelling skills. Reading Research Quarterly, 32, 154—167.
Perfetti, C.A. (1999). Comprehending written language: A blueprint of the reader. In C. M. Brown & P. Hagoort (Eds.), The neurocognition of language (pp. 167—208). New York: Oxford University Press.
38.
Perfetti, C.A., Beck, I., Bell, L.C., & Hughes, C. (1988). Phonemic knowledge and learning to read are reciprocal: A longitudinal study of first grade children. In K. E. Stanovich (Ed.), Children's reading and the development of phonological awareness (pp. 39—75). Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press.
39.
Perfetti, C.A., & McCutchen, D. (1982). Speech processes in reading. In N. Lass (Ed.), Speech and language: Advances in basic research and practice (pp. 237—269). New York : Academic Press.
40.
Perfetti, C.A., Zhang, S., & Berent, I. (1992). Reading in English and Chinese: Evidence for a “universal” phonological principle. In R. Frost & L. Katz (Eds.), Orthography phonology, morphology, and meaning (pp. 227—248). New York :: Elsevier.
41.
Robinson, D.H., & Katayama, A.D. (1997). At-lexical, articulatory interference in silent reading: The “up-stream” tongue-twister effect. Memory & Cognition, 25, 661—665.
42.
Rosenthal, R., & Rubin, D. (1982). A simple, general purpose display of magnitude of experimental effect. Journal of Educational Psychology , 74, 166—169.
43.
Share, D.L., & Leiken, M. (2004). Language impairment at school entry and later reading disability: Connections at lexical and supralexical levels of reading . Scientific Studies of Reading, 8, 87—110.
44.
Share, D.L., & Stanovich, K.E. (1995). Cognitive processes in early reading development: Accommodating individual differences into a model of acquisition. Issues in Education: Contributions fromEducational Psychology, 1, 1—57.
45.
Snow, C., Burns, M., & Griffin, P. (Eds.). (1998). Preventing reading difficulties in young children . Washington, DC: National Academy Press.
46.
Spinks, J.A., Liu, Y., Perfetti, C.A., & Tan, L.H. (2000). Reading Chinese characters for meaning: The role of phonological information. Cognition, 76, B1—B11.
47.
Stanovich, K.E. (2000). Progress in understanding reading: Scientific foundations and new frontiers. New York: Guilford Press.
48.
Stanovich, K.E., Cunningham, A.E., & Cramer, B.B. (1984). Assessing phonological awareness in kindergarten children: Issues of task comparability. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 38, 175— 190.
49.
Stanovich, K.E., Siegel, L.S., & Gottardo, A. (1997). Converging evidence for phonological and surface subtypes of reading disability. Journal of Educational Psychology , 89, 114—127.
50.
Torgesen, J.K., & Bryant, B.R. (1994). Test of phonological awareness. Austin, TX: PRO-ED.
51.
Wagner, R.K., Torgesen, J.K., Rashotte, C.A., Hecht, S.A., Barker, T.A., Burgess, S.R., et al. (1997). Changing relations between phonological processing abilities and word-level reading as children develop from beginning to skilled readers: A 5-year longitudinal study. Developmental Psychology, 33, 468—479.
52.
Wimmer, H., Mayringer, H., & Landerl, K. (1998). Poor reading: A deficit in skill automatization or a phonological deficit?Scientific Studies of Reading, 2, 321—340.
53.
Windfuhr, K.L., & Snowling, M.J. (2001). The relationship between paired associate learning and phonological skills in normally developing readers . Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 80, 160— 173.
